The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for coming back from Poland full of admiration for their ability to throw down, getting disgusted at the idiocy of British Rail Staff, seeing how your Beta Ray Bill pages in issue 3 turned out and compiling a post of all the fine reading from across the week while trying to avoid linking to some piece of pop music you rediscovered in the last week.

• Average gamer is fat, depressed and 35. Yeah, a lot of people exploded at this one. I suspect we all will too.
• Comrade Ste sighed nostalgically as he realised it was 10 years since the wonder of Old Man Murray's Drakan Theme week. It's not actually 10 years yet, but such pedantry is only for the noxious. i.e. Walker.
• Actually, talking about OMM, Jim talked to Chet Faliszek over at Offworld about why AI constructs are depressing. Because they take over the world and enslave us, you fool. Much more about L4D2 too, natch.
• Rammykins published a piece he contributed to a defunct mag where he got the Dave Taurus, Rick Porter and myself to chip in on games prices affecting reviews. I'm right. Everyone else is wrong. Especially Taurus. Again.
• Society Eye had a good week, especially if indie-interviews is your thing. Firstly they talk to Interactive Fiction-ite, indie-chap and comics-creator Jim Munroe. And then they talk to Zombiecow's Dan Marshall about - oooh - you guess.
• I missed this when it was posted, but reading Zorg's take on his time working for the corporate dollar after selling out UK Resistance (and then getting it back) was interesting.
• Meanwhile, people are still talking about Left 4 Dead. The Slow Down takes apart the characters in the game, analysing the original looks in comparison to the final ones, and thinks about what that means for L4D2.
• Bit-tech do a hefty piece on the problems of porting games. The problem is: it's hard.
• And if it is too tricky, Brandon Sheffield compiles some nasty-dirty-coding-cheats for Gamasutra. They're the programming equivalent of "drop in a nob gag" in games journalism, I suspect.
• A splash of Academia: Towards A Theory Of Domestic Gaming.
• Adventure Classic Gaming talk to Tale of Tales about - well - them.
• Crytek's Cevat Yerli talks to Gamasutra about the future of graphics.
• On Bladerunner and the future.
• Scientists modeling zombie attacks. The question being, did they consider the possibility of everyone backing into a closet and melee attacking?
• I say we defeat them with high-speed-robot arms.
• A quick pod-cast recommendation. Geek Syndicate did an interview with English TV Presenter and geek-figurehead Jonathan Ross. As usual, Ross is most interesting when talking about what he's most interested in. That is, geeking out spectacularly. Mainly on comics, but the splash of videogames - he likes R-Type and is a Warcraft/Warhammer-widow thanks to Ex-games-journo wife, now-screenwriter Jane Goldman - it's fun stuff. Get here.
• Something that'll be of interest to any artists in the house. It's Disney's Carson Van Osten's comic-creation-guide-kit-thing.
• I don't think I mentioned a couple of weeks back when Marvel announced my first ongoing for them, S.W.O.R.D. Well this week they followed that with the announcement that I'll be taking over on Thor from JMS. Crikey.
• Saint Etienne's How We Used To Live. Magical. Give it to the middle section to disagree. Rediscovered thanks to Pitchfork marching through their singles of the 00s this week. Best of all, someone's turned all the tracks on Spotify into a playlist, which is an agreeable walk through the 00s.

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